Tuesday, January 08, 2013

Only 156 Jews remain in Yemen

A tiny Jewish community in the Yemeni province of Ammran is threatened
with extinction as its members step up immigration in the face of
increasing harassment, this informative article in J.Weekly. com states. They are only waiting to sell their homes before leaving.

Only four families remain out of hundreds of Jews who used to live in
the town of Raida, 37 miles northwest of the Yemeni capital Sanaa.
These four extended families comprise the country’s largest Jewish
community, no more than 100 people, according to leader Rabbi Suleiman
Yahya, 45.
President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi reportedly is designating Jewish
seats at the national dialogue conference tasked with drafting a new
constitution.

Rabbi Suleiman Yahya (right) and some members of Yemen’s Jewish community (photos/the media line-abdulrahman shamlan)

The only other Jews in the poverty-stricken country are housed in a
protected residential area in Sanaa, forced in 2007 to leave their homes
by the Tehran-backed Houthi Movement. The group numbers around 56,
according to its leader, Rabbi Yahya Yusif Mosa.(...)

Last May, a member of the Jewish community shopping in a Sanaa market
was murdered for practicing “Jewish witchcraft.” Since the Arab Spring
uprisings, according to a Jewish Agency official, Yemen is “in chaos and
the Jews are not safe.” Most of the few remaining Jews live in
isolation due to increasing aggression from the tribal society around
them.

“After my house was robbed earlier this year, I stopped socializing
with people. I stopped going to their houses for khat sessions and I
don’t receive them at mine,” Yahya said. “While I was not in Raida,
someone broke into my house late at night and stole 32 million Yemeni
riyals,” worth almost $150,000. According to him, the stolen money was
composed of gold and cash, half of which was for the families that have
left Yemen.

Yemeni Jewish women cover their faces according to local tribal custom

At the Jewish school in Raida where Yahya teaches, the pupils are only
taught Hebrew, religious studies and mathematics. There are no English
language courses or any other subjects included in the curriculum,
according to Yahya. Most students go abroad to continue their studies at
13 or 14, he said.

When asked how they could be accepted in American or Israeli schools
given their limited educational background, Yahya said, “They are only
accepted in Jewish schools.”

Until recently, Jewish girls did not go to school at all. But Yahya
says that has recently changed. He became the example for his community,
he said, when he taught his own daughter, the first Jewish girl allowed
to study. Now she is a teacher for other Jewish girls, he said.

There is a single synagogue in Raida in which Jews pray on the
Sabbath and holidays. As for daily prayers, everyone prays alone because
there are no longer enough men to make up a minyan.
Yemeni Jews share many of the same tribal customs as their Muslim
neighbors. For instance, Yemeni women — Jewish and Muslim — do not
appear before male strangers. Jewish girls as young as 10 are covered in
black from head to toe, and their faces are veiled.

Rabbi Suleiman Yahya lives in this house with his family and 80-year-old father.

Even at school, only female teachers can teach the girls in segregated classrooms, according to Yahya.

Yemeni Jews complain of widespread harassment and discrimination.
“Whenever you go, they call you ‘Jew’ or ‘Zionist.’ Sometimes children
throw stones at our houses and adults harass our women,” he said,
attributing some of that behavior to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“In the past, they would harass Jews when there was a war, and when
the war ended the harassment ended with it. But recently, even when
there is no war, we are still subjected to different kinds of
harassment,” Yahya said, adding, “We have nothing to do with Israeli
Zionism.”

According to Yahya, sometimes Jews go to tribal chiefs to complain or seek arbitration.
“We are living in a tribal area where the tribe is stronger than the
government. That’s why we sometimes resort to seeking justice from the
tribal sheikhs,” he said.

“Living here has become unbearable,” Yahya said, adding that “most of
the remaining Jews are only waiting to sell their properties before
leaving Yemen for good.”

Five families have left in the past 20 months, he said. He expects
that in a few years, there will be no Jews remaining in Yemen.Read article in full

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Introduction

In just 50 years, almost a million Jews, whose communities stretch back up to 3,000 years, have been 'ethnically cleansed' from 10 Arab countries. These refugees outnumber the Palestinian refugees two to one, but their narrative has all but been ignored. Unlike Palestinian refugees, they fled not war, but systematic persecution. Seen in this light, Israel, where some 50 percent of the Jewish population descend from these refugees and are now full citizens, is the legitimate expression of the self-determination of an oppressed indigenous, Middle Eastern people.This website is dedicated to preserving the memory of the near-extinct Jewish communities, which can never return to what and where they once were - even if they wanted to. It will attempt to pass on the stories of the Jewish refugees and their current struggle for recognition and restitution. Awareness of the injustice done to these Jews can only advance the cause of peace and reconciliation.(Iran: once an ally of Israel, the Islamic Republic of Iran is now an implacable enemy and numbers of Iranian Jews have fallen drastically from 80,000 to 20,000 since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Their plight - and that of all other communities threatened by Islamism - does therefore fall within the scope of this blog.)